Are you ready for the rise of SaaS and cloud-based solutions?

June 27, 2019 -
Tech Trends

Cloud-based solutions are here to stay – which is why it might be high time to take advantage of them. Find out how you can use SaaS tools to transform your business.

Cloud computing has been a trending topic for a few years now. Yet, many businesses still don’t seem to know how to take advantage of cloud-based solutions. It might be because the awareness of their benefits remains insufficient – even though “the cloud” basically surrounds us nowadays.

As the popularity of SaaS model increases, though, it’s only a matter of time before cloud-based solutions power a lot more companies. Here’s what SaaS & cloud-based solutions can do for your business and how to make good use of them before your competitors do.

What are cloud-based solutions in the first place?

Essentially, cloud computing revolves around storing and accessing data over the Internet, instead of having everything on your computer’s hard drive. It means that the entire computing power relies on the Internet, and can be made available whenever required, in whichever amount.

As a result, incorporating cloud-based solutions makes it possible to expand the capabilities of any business beyond the limits of the existing in-house systems. The physical storage network and the environment are actually owned by companies providing such solutions, so there’s no need to worry about maintaining a large infrastructure yourself.

As it happens, there are different types of cloud application services, depending on the purpose and your requirements. For example, SaaS (Software as a Service) is a software distribution model, in which a specific application is hosted by the developers and made available to customers via Internet. The idea behind PaaS (Platform as a Service), on the other hand, is to provide programming environments and developer tools to organisations on demand, so that they can develop and test their own applications. This time, though, we’re going to focus on SaaS solutions – and there are a few reasons for that.

Why is it worth taking advantage of SaaS model?

There’s no doubt that Software as a Service model is becoming mainstream, but why exactly? The main motive behind the “mass adoption” of SaaS is that it’s often a perfect choice for particular types of applications. In fact, a growing number of tech suppliers starts to offer powerful cloud-based solutions for automation, analytics and management, which often prove to be much more difficult to develop and maintain in-house. At the same time, they can provide your business with a lot of benefits.

Increased productivity

Digital workplaces are changing constantly, with increasingly more teams being dispersed and on the move. Because of that, there’s a demand for better collaboration and communication tools to keep up with the needs of both employees and customers. That’s precisely why companies began to leverage cloud-based solutions that streamline business processes they have in place. No wonder: SaaS model offers a common platform for users – employees can easily work with one another on various tasks, while organisations can focus on finding the most efficient ways to manage the whole team.

Asana and Stackfield serve as perfect examples of tools that improve team collaboration, as they offer everything that’s possibly needed to be more productive at work, including effective communication and task progression.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation is probably the most popular case of SaaS model in action. In fact, the industry is expected to reach $5.5 billion in 2019 – and that’s hardly surprising, given the benefits of automation and AI for marketing (especially if based on relevant, well-written content and proper targetting). A powerful cloud-based solution can easily let you tailor your marketing activities to your target audience, track results of every campaign, and optimise your efforts.

If you manage multiple social media profiles for your business and want to start your journey with marketing automation, try Kontentino – it will let you automate your content, as well as the tasks of your social media team.

Lead generation & managementLead generation & management

While marketing automation has the power to engage prospects and convert them into loyal customers, you can also use cloud-based solutions to “find” leads yourself and manage them afterwards. What’s in it for your team? Basically, you can free your sales specialists from manual tasks, letting them focus more on generating quality leads and closing deals.

Rumour has it that the most popular sales tools include CRM, social prospecting, data and list services, email engagement, phone, and sales cadence. Take Livespace, as an example. It’s a process-focused CRM with task and sales automation, as well as drip email capability.

Improved customer experience

By 2020, customer experience is set to overtake product and price as the main driver behind consumers’ purchasing decisions. No wonder – along with the rise of new technologies, customer expectations also increase. As a result, providing outstanding support becomes a top priority for many organisations. This can be improved with powerful cloud-based solutions and careful analytics.

If you want to increase the effectiveness of your support team, you should test cloud-based call centre solutions out. CloudTalk, for example, will allow you to make and receive calls from any place (and device) you want, manage the orders of your customers, make data-driven decisions based on the insights you have and, essentially, deliver personalised support at all times.

Cloud-based solutions are here to stay

There’s no doubt that cloud-based solutions are now more popular than ever – and rightly so, as they can make a great difference for your business as well. In fact, it’s likely that “Software as a Service” will soon be able to address even more critical issues for every company out there. By investing in the right tech solutions right now, you’ll be ready to take your business to the next level in no time.

The only thing left to do is to make sure you have the right people who can embrace digital transformation on board. Use TieTalent to get instantly matched with a shortlist of top tech talents and hire the best ones.